...this novel is a tough one for me, and I warmly invite any direction. That being said, here you go:
Within Madame de Stael’s Corinne, or Italy and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, we observe two heroines who are distinct and distinctly different in terms of enthusiasm. We may locate this divergence in character construction in how their physical/emotional environments, as well as their engagement with other characters, infect their thought processes, physical health, and social performances. Whereas Corinne succumbs to an infectious environment and experience with love, Fanny Price wards off moral and experiential contamination by mental resistance (self-regulation). In this context, it is valuable to take into account that Jane Austen is notable for parodying specific genres, such as the Gothic within Northanger Abbey, and within Mansfield Park, she seems to parody not only traditional marriage plots but also what she perhaps regards as vulgar romanticism that may be found within Corinne, or Italy. When Corinne’s relative autonomy is threatened by institutional pressures, memories of prescriptive ideals of domesticity forced upon her by her stepmother, and her disillusionment of Oswald, her enthusiasm transforms into a mental poison that works on itself and her physical health, and its only cure is, arguably, the experience of a beautiful, poetic death: “There is nothing in this world that was not poisoned by the memory of you” (393). By comparison, the construction of Fanny Price partly relies on Austen’s use of the via negativa to the other characters in the isolated social body, and her speculations on memory are starkly different from Corinne’s: “If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful, I do think it is memory…our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out” (223). Because of these interactions, we see her slowly transform from a repressed, apprehensive, and self-regulating individual to an individual thrust into subjectivity and identity; as revealed towards the end of Volume II, though, we see she is still prone to contamination, which must be contained. In this comparison, we may deduce a departure from Romanticism that sets the scene for many Victorian novelists.
Within Corinne, or Italy, Corinne’s infection and, thus, the death of the poetess rests upon her emotional investments in Oswald, which psychosomatically affect her physical health. At first, her experience of love acts synchronically with Plato’s descriptions of love in Phaedrus, which posits love as a divine source of inspiration: “And the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madmen” (148). For many (Neoplatonic) Romantics, this description of love was understood as a source of poetic and imaginative insight for truth and experiencing sensations of transcendence. Corinne’s decline may be identified in her disillusionment of the Platonic ideal she has created of Oswald with her imaginative speculation and investment, and this disillusionment is experienced when she becomes conscious of the fact that his preoccupations with the material—with institutional pressures, prescriptive social standards, and domestic expectations from his father—take precedent. With the experience of that loss of love comes the decline of her poetic sentiments, as a Romantic/redemptive poet, to morally direct her audiences; imagination and artistic creation are stifled, and this discord, or disharmony, psychosomatically affects her physical health, eventually to her death.
In contrast to de Stael’s Corinne, within Mansfield Park, Austen’s Fanny Price evidences a strong mental resistance and self-regulation to the infectious environment of institutional pressures and domestic social standards. She is part of a community whose values consist of materialism and economic status, which is the enthusiastic driving force for what they call “alliances” with other families and the pursuits to marry. Most of the people within Mansfield Park are overly critical of each other to the point of almost being incapable of experiencing any emotions outside of pride, envy and wrath, and when they do show an act of kindness, it is usually with incentives for their own future economic advantage (save for Edmund, who [admittedly] I’m still trying to figure out). Fanny’s resistance to such an infectious environment, despite her treatment and the situations in which she finds herself displaced, becomes her strength—something which Corinne is found wanting. Fanny, being an educated woman, does not rely on highly idealistic notions of the imagination to transcend her conditions (at least up until this point); rather, in many instances, she relies on her intuition, perception(s), and experience—of anticipation, speculation and conscience—to resist such malignant impressions. She resolves, “But this must be learned to be endured” (292).
Within Madame de Stael’s Corinne, or Italy and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, we observe two heroines who are distinct and distinctly different in terms of enthusiasm. We may locate this divergence in character construction in how their physical/emotional environments, as well as their engagement with other characters, infect their thought processes, physical health, and social performances. Whereas Corinne succumbs to an infectious environment and experience with love, Fanny Price wards off moral and experiential contamination by mental resistance (self-regulation). In this context, it is valuable to take into account that Jane Austen is notable for parodying specific genres, such as the Gothic within Northanger Abbey, and within Mansfield Park, she seems to parody not only traditional marriage plots but also what she perhaps regards as vulgar romanticism that may be found within Corinne, or Italy. When Corinne’s relative autonomy is threatened by institutional pressures, memories of prescriptive ideals of domesticity forced upon her by her stepmother, and her disillusionment of Oswald, her enthusiasm transforms into a mental poison that works on itself and her physical health, and its only cure is, arguably, the experience of a beautiful, poetic death: “There is nothing in this world that was not poisoned by the memory of you” (393). By comparison, the construction of Fanny Price partly relies on Austen’s use of the via negativa to the other characters in the isolated social body, and her speculations on memory are starkly different from Corinne’s: “If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful, I do think it is memory…our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out” (223). Because of these interactions, we see her slowly transform from a repressed, apprehensive, and self-regulating individual to an individual thrust into subjectivity and identity; as revealed towards the end of Volume II, though, we see she is still prone to contamination, which must be contained. In this comparison, we may deduce a departure from Romanticism that sets the scene for many Victorian novelists.
Within Corinne, or Italy, Corinne’s infection and, thus, the death of the poetess rests upon her emotional investments in Oswald, which psychosomatically affect her physical health. At first, her experience of love acts synchronically with Plato’s descriptions of love in Phaedrus, which posits love as a divine source of inspiration: “And the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madmen” (148). For many (Neoplatonic) Romantics, this description of love was understood as a source of poetic and imaginative insight for truth and experiencing sensations of transcendence. Corinne’s decline may be identified in her disillusionment of the Platonic ideal she has created of Oswald with her imaginative speculation and investment, and this disillusionment is experienced when she becomes conscious of the fact that his preoccupations with the material—with institutional pressures, prescriptive social standards, and domestic expectations from his father—take precedent. With the experience of that loss of love comes the decline of her poetic sentiments, as a Romantic/redemptive poet, to morally direct her audiences; imagination and artistic creation are stifled, and this discord, or disharmony, psychosomatically affects her physical health, eventually to her death.
In contrast to de Stael’s Corinne, within Mansfield Park, Austen’s Fanny Price evidences a strong mental resistance and self-regulation to the infectious environment of institutional pressures and domestic social standards. She is part of a community whose values consist of materialism and economic status, which is the enthusiastic driving force for what they call “alliances” with other families and the pursuits to marry. Most of the people within Mansfield Park are overly critical of each other to the point of almost being incapable of experiencing any emotions outside of pride, envy and wrath, and when they do show an act of kindness, it is usually with incentives for their own future economic advantage (save for Edmund, who [admittedly] I’m still trying to figure out). Fanny’s resistance to such an infectious environment, despite her treatment and the situations in which she finds herself displaced, becomes her strength—something which Corinne is found wanting. Fanny, being an educated woman, does not rely on highly idealistic notions of the imagination to transcend her conditions (at least up until this point); rather, in many instances, she relies on her intuition, perception(s), and experience—of anticipation, speculation and conscience—to resist such malignant impressions. She resolves, “But this must be learned to be endured” (292).